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labnjab's 75 Gallon Reef Build

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Were quickly collecting the pieces for our tank merger so I thought I'd start a journal. We plan on merging our 2 29 gallon reefs into one 75 gallon rr tank. Our goal is to simulate a reef transition zone with live rock piled up on the right half under a 250 watt phoenix 14000K hqi then it will slope to a large sand area with a few chunks of rock on the left under t-5's. Sps and a clam on the right and lps and softies on the left. It will have the 85 lbs of live rock we currently have along with 20-30 lbs of dry rock

Tank
Used All Glass aquarium 75 gallon Reef Ready tank. We upgraded the standpipe from a crappy homemade stockman to a better durso style, which I need to make one small adjustment to.

Before

After- The only changes I have to make are adding a street 90 degree to give me more room

The stand is going to be custom made by me so we can fit our lage skimmer underneath. I picked up most of the lumber yesterday and got it cut to size. I'm going to assemble it tonight

At this point the only thing holding us up is building the stand and buying sand. Were going with a all new sandbed seeded with our old to elimnate any problems with switching over our old sandbed. I have to save up a few more weeks because the sand is going to be about $200 for 200lbs of dry aragonite. Hopefully we'll have everything switched over before christmas

Thank you everyone. I started building the stand on my lunch break. I made the mistake of not pre-drilling some holes on the 1st piece and split it, so its off to home depot for another board. I have the bottom and 2 legs complete. I'll finish the frame tonight and will get some plywood later in the week to box it in. Here's a quick camera phone pic of what I've done so far

The only concern I have are where the bulkhead fittings come through the bottom of the tank. Its gonna be a tight fit but I'm hoping i'll be ok

It will probably never be done, lol. I'll always think of new things to add or move around, or I may trade one coral for another. I can tell you another 6 months or so the back and side glass and all the rocks will be really purple from Coraline algae

Just a quick update. Everything is doing great. The hawkfish is leaving the yellow corris alone for the most part. The only time the wrasse hides is if I start messing around in the tank. Coral is growing great. I finally got the calcium and alk back up to where I want it and my calcium reactor pretty much stays on all night because the ph is staying up. I did have to add a small booster pump to the calcium reactors intake. For some reason its not drawing in water too well but the pump solved that. Coral is growing very well, especially our sps

I stole the booster pump for the calcium from our carbon reactor, which is ok since its way past time to change the carbon. I think I'm going to start mixing the carbon into our gfo reactor so save space and it helps keep the gfo from clumping.